Hajar was born in Berlin, Germany, the daughter of Iranian political refugees. Her life has been spent - and indelibly shaped by - living in the United States as a child of immigrants. She grew up in Northern Virginia, attended the University of Virginia as an undergraduate student, and spent ten wonderful years living in New York City (with some back-and-forth to graduate school at UNC Chapel Hill where she received her Ph.D. in Sociology). Hajar is based in Los Angeles now. She is indebted to her free-thinking parents for her sociological imagination and to her children for her commitment to a more just world.